The top 50 IT service companies worldwide employ 173,000, or 14 percent, of their 1.25 million workforce in India, as they tap into that country's low-cost IT and back-office skills base, according to ComputerWire. And the worldwide market for offshore IT services will grow to $17 billion by 2008, according to IDC.
Because HR is one of the biggest expenses in IT budgets, almost every company is trying to reduce the quantitative aspects (head count, for instance), while devoting less attention to qualitative measurements like service level, response time and customer satisfaction.
Vendors continue to push intelligence-in-a-can products such as firewall appliances and megamanagement tools, and corporate America is buying their stories. Solve our problems with a single product instead of expensive personnel with talent and skills? Great. Companies that opt for the fairy tale hire inexperienced, untrained workers to sit on the phone with overseas support personnel trying to figure out why shoddy products don't work and poorly selected products lack the functionality to get the job done.
Corporate users bear the brunt of these decisions. Even as IT products become more complex, IT support becomes more limited: Helpdesk staff isn't knowledgeable in all hardware products and applications, equipment upgrades are infrequent, and user training is minimal or nil. Users complain about IT, giving management an excuse to cut in-house IT even more. It's your quintessential catch-22.
Turn This Baby Around
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
